C A R R O L L   Q U I G L E Y   5

The Future of Western Civilization

Elements

If you want to know where you're likely to go, you need to know three things:

1. where you've been
2. where you are now
3. what pattern best fits your motion

We've seen that third element in detail: Quigley's "seven stages." This sequence of mixture, gestation, expansion, and conflict, followed by either a return to expansion or a universal state and thence to decay and invasion, is the recurring pattern Quigley observed in the historical record.

This pattern allows us to chart the motion of civilizations through time. To find out where Western civilization in particular may be headed, then, we need to answer the first two questions. Where has Western civilization been, and in which of Quigley's stages is Western civilization now?

Origins of Western Civilization

Carroll Quigley's assessment of the cultures that came together to form Western civilization is remarkably conventional. (Perhaps this is why he spends only one or two paragraphs on the question.) He essentially ratifies the notion of the West as having four sources:

• Classical
• Semitic
• Celtic
• Islamic

Each of these is held to have contributed certain qualities that give Western civilization its unique flavor. From Classical civilization the West took its knowledge of law, government, philosophy, and science. The enormous Semitic contribution to the West came in the form of religion and ethics--in a word, Christianity. And although Quigley disparages its influence somewhat, he gives a nod to the Celtic tribes of northwestern Europe for their "social relations and technology" (to which I would add "individualism" and "property rights"). Finally, he acknowledges the debt of the West to the Arabic culture, which preserved and eventually transmitted to the West what Quigley called "Classical influences," the most important of which I believe to be legal (the legal Code distilled by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian) and intellectual (primarily in mathematics, especially Euclid's geometry and algebra).

These factors merged over time, modifying one another's influences. For example, the combination of Classical law (which upheld the authority of the state) with Celtic tribal law (eventually encoded as the "common law" which recognized the natural rights of individual human beings) formed a legal system that balanced the rights of the individual against the requirements of society. Of all the unique achievements of the West, the successful fusion of these two strong and diverse legal traditions into a coherent code of justice must rank among the greatest.

Having granted the common understanding of the West's sources, Quigley is then quick to point out that the fusing of these sources produced a civilization that was entirely original in its character. Quigley characterized the West as "optimistic, moderate, hierarchical, democratic, individualistic yet social, and dynamic." (To which I would only add "practical" in the same style as the Phoenicians.)

These attributes that make up Western civilization's "personality" can be identified in the six aspects Quigley suggested for tracking a civilization's progress over time--religious, military, political and so on. (Though again, I prefer to highlight eight aspects, adding ethical and technological features to a civilization's profile.) For example, where Classical military organization began and ended as infantry, the West's greater facility with new technology led it to adopt mounted cavalry as its military paradigm. (This preference for relatively small, mobile, and powerful units is still dominant in Western civilization. Note that it emphasizes the contribution of the individual within the group. Also, contrast it with the "lots of small, simple, tough units" military philosophy favored by the armies of the Warsaw Pact, which reflected aspects of Russian civilization.)

Quigley also spends considerable time explaining how Christianity modified and accentuated the individualistic yet social nature of Western society. He notes its optimistic organized religious philosophy which holds that man is flawed but can be redeemed, and that the divine must be approached in community with other persons but that souls are entrusted to individuals. Again, as the West's legal code struck a balance between the state and the individual, Christianity also recognized the existence and interdependence of individual human beings and the societies they voluntarily form. Of course, just as the law sometimes fails to provide justice, Christianity has at times failed to recognize that redemption is worthless if not voluntary. But again similarly to the value of the entire Western legal code despite its occasional lapses, the virtues of the Christian West far outweigh its vices. Despite the Inquisition and some (perhaps most) of the Crusades, far more citizens of the West over the last thousand years have practiced compassion, charity, forgiveness and trust than the members of any other religion that can be identified with a particular civilization. On balance, Christianity contributed positively to the success of the West.

Of at least equal importance was the West's early adoption of animal (and, later, mechanical) power over Classical civilization's reliance on human muscle power as an economic engine. One of the greatest advantages the West has had over every other civilization thus far has been its ability and willingness to increase the amount of energy readily available to individuals. Every advance in the power of individuals to exercise their rights seems to be tied to the amount of energy available to any such individual at the flick of a finger. The tie may not be perfectly direct (correlation does not imply causality), but it is there. "Energy" may be synonymous with "power" in more ways than one.

The other traits Quigley mentions can be seen in the West as well. Taken together, these traits of optimism, dynamism and so on are the characteristic qualities that define Western civilization.

The Past West

The West, according to Quigley's analysis, has had three different instruments of expansion, each of which became institutionalized. One was reformed, and one was circumvented, while remnants of the third institution remain with us today as we grope toward a new instrument of expansion.

These instruments were feudalism, commercial capitalism, and industrial/financial capitalism.

Feudalism

The collapse of Classical (Greco-Roman) civilization provided building material for no fewer than three other civilizations: the proto-Russian culture to the northeast of the Mediterranean region; the Arabic culture embracing Islam in the south; and the Christian tribes in the forests of the northwest. (There is still debate over whether the Byzantine empire constituted a new civilization, or whether it was the final fixed form of Classical civilization.) The instrument of expansion for what would become Western civilization grew out of the need to defend Christianity from the mounted warriors of the other two neighboring young civilizations. This early military-technological instrument of Western expansion is known as feudalism.

As the shock weapon of the day, the only thing that could defeat a mounted warrior was another mounted warrior. A political entity that wanted to survive thus had to produce such fighters. We call these mounted warriors knights, and the social, economic and political system which permitted their creation, support, and fielding became the primary organizing force of early Western civilization.

The trouble with knights was that they were outrageously expensive. In addition to the obvious needs of raising, stabling, feeding and training a knight's multiple mounts, the knight himself required constant training and support. He also needed arms and armor, which were expensive and eventually required special craftsmen to maintain and fit.

The high cost of maintaining knights required a large number of people assigned to agricultural work. (Food was the primary source of barter material--and thus revenue--in the days preceding coinage.) The ratio of land-workers to knights was about a hundred to one; that is, every knight needed at least a hundred people working the land to support him. As the knight's equipment became more complex and thus more costly, and more persons shifted from agricultural work to non-agricultural support roles (armorer, stableboy, quarryman, etc.), still more field workers were necessary per knight.

Because the knight was always able to apply his power over the field workers over the short term (even though his existence depended on theirs over the longer term), the knights as a class were able to push the system so that they actually took more from the agricultural class than was needed for maintenance. Eventually this excess income became the surplus that Quigley argues is necessary to create an instrument of expansion.

The knights soon recognized their dependence on peasant labor. At first this was to maintain military might, but later it became an economic imperative as well. In early feudalism, knights took the direct approach: workers were not permitted to stray from the lands they worked. As this form of restraint spread geographically and survived over time, it was formalized; first as tradition, then as "legal" rules binding the peasants to the land they worked in exchange for protection and justice provided by the master of those lands. The agricultural workers became what we call "serfs."

Thus, the knight existed to protect the serfs, and the serfs existed to support the knight. Over time, this protective role of the knight became progressively finer-grained. What began as defending one's serfs against heathen invaders became defending them against other knights, and finally to defending individual serfs from one another.

(Note that relics of this migration of the defense function from the group to the individual, from the military realm to the legal, remain with us to this day. Consider how the personification of "Justice" is often artistically represented holding a sword. Another example is the use of the term "Esq." or "esquire" among modern lawyers. The term was used in feudal times to refer to a knight's shield-bearer, who aspired to knighthood himself. Such a person was expected to "earn his spurs" of knighthood by traveling his lord's lands, upholding justice in his lord's name.)

As the threat of external invasion faded, the process of internal consolidation of control intensified. Knights turned more toward fighting each other, sometimes to establish dominance, sometimes simply for plunder.

Groups of knights began to organize in the fundamental military organization, the hierarchy. A lone knight or one with hostile neighbors might swear to support a more powerful knight in return for that greater knight's protection. Eventually this relationship, like that of the knight to his serfs, became formalized as lord to vassal. The land (called the "fee") owned by a lord was assigned to a vassal in return for that vassal's support, either in direct military assistance or, particularly in the late feudal period, money in lieu of military service (a bargain called "scutage"). A lesser knight might have a handful of vassals, while a powerful knight might attract many strong knights with vassals of their own. It is this formal organization of lords and vassals defined by property rights and legal obligations of service, supported by a much more numerous second class of persons required to provide economic support, which is properly recognized as "feudalism."

The feudal system allowed the young Western civilization to survive and grow in two ways. First, it backed the military system that protected its rough geopolitical borders. Second, it was productive enough to permit some to accumulate surpluses. These effects allowed feudalism to survive to become an instrument of expansion.

Feudalism to Municipal Mercantilism

The agricultural support aspect of feudalism took the form of tracts of land whose output (crops, game, wood, stone, etc.) was collected at a manor house for storage and distribution. With the passage of time, more and more vassals began to provide these collected manorial surpluses to their feudal lords in place of military service. But increasing population and agricultural improvements meant that even after payments to one's lord there were surpluses remaining. These surpluses could be applied to general improvements, but they also allowed personal spending on non-essential goods.

And so commerce was reborn. Where it had languished after the collapse of Mediterranean-based Classical civilization, trade became possible again to acquire luxury items from distant lands. The surplus wealth accumulated over the years by powerful families of knights was invested in voyages of exploration and the opening of trade routes both by sea around the Spanish coast and by land through Alpine passes. Local economies trading among themselves sprang up to specialize in various products, from cheeses in good pasture lands, to wines from the hills, to grains from open fields.

As commerce began to flourish, commercial centers began to form around some of the most successful manors. Some became villages, some towns, and some--those in particularly good trade locations or positions of military defense value--prospered enough to attract so many people as to become cities. This increase in economic opportunity freed some individuals from general agricultural labor and allowed them to take up more specialized trades. This produced more goods for trade, which in turn added to the general prosperity.

This acceleration of economic and other aspects of Western civilization reached its peak in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, which Quigley marks as an Age of Expansion for the West. During this time, improvements in one aspect enabled advances in others. More travel led to enhanced trade; trade needed military protection; armed forces made use of technological improvements; new technologies sprang from the increased exchange of scientific knowledge; new knowledge raised new ethical questions answered by revisions and expansions of Christian belief; differences of belief promoted the establishment of standard legal codes and the creation of political entities which became nations; and nations profited by increased trade.

This feudal trade in goods was so widespread and so brisk that all other aspects of Western civilization were pulled forward. As an example of how far an individual could travel, consider the case of Harald Fairhair of Norway. Born into one of Norway's ruling houses, he fled his home in the early 11th century, traveling nearly the length of Europe to join the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople (today's Istanbul, Turkey). Later Harald returned to Norway to become king, ultimately contending against his cousin Harold and the Norman duke William for the English throne in 1066. His travels and exploits would have been nearly unthinkable in the static and arrogant Classical civilization; only the dynamic and capitalistic Western civilization offered an individual such opportunities.

It couldn't last, of course.

Feudalism, like all instruments of expansion, eventually became institutionalized. The primary cause of this was the transition from what was essentially a barter economy to a money economy.

By 1274--the year in which Thomas Aquinas died and Edward I was crowned King of England--the military-oriented feudal hierarchy had condensed and solidified into a political and economic hierarchy referred to as "chivalry." Over time, as coinage was introduced and became widespread, the old obligation of vassals and serfs to pay in kind through service had been replaced by payment in money. Military service was now entrusted to professional soldiers: royal and ducal guards and mercenaries, all of whom rendered their military service in return for pay. This placed financial pressure on ambitious lords. With their numbers now essentially fixed according to territory, the princes began to compete among themselves for limited resources, rather than expanding into new areas of trade that benefitted everyone even if some did better than others.

The money being pumped into the system from years of brisk trade began to exceed the quantity of goods available for purchase. As always happens when the supply of money exceeds what can be bought with that money, prices rose. The new commercial classes, feeling their profits shrinking as high prices reduced sales, began enacting laws to try to protect those profits. But in doing so, they accelerated the the erosion of those profits by shrinking the overall rate of investment in new trade.

The Hanseatic League is one of the better-known examples of this. At first an organization of merchants in some German cities, it later came to be represented by cities themselves, whose goal was to take an active role in protecting their trade profits. (Thus the name "municipal mercantilism.") In addition to combating Danish piracy and promoting trade routes, the League established numerous policies intended to restrict trade. It instituted tariffs on goods passing through its hands, capped the output of goods produced, prevented entry of new workers into protected industries, restricted buying and selling in town markets, and raised prices. In short, the Hanseatic League practiced what we today would call "protectionism," and other merchant guilds were quick to follow suit to protect their own profits. The effect of this municipal mercantilism was to further discourage investment in new trade. It was not long until the West's first Age of Expansion collapsed into an Age of Conflict.

The West began to display the widespread economic tumult that is one of the typical indicators of an Age of Conflict once the supply of easily-mined gold and silver bullion began to run out. With less money available to buy goods, demand declined, and prices fell as a result. As prices fell while wages and the cost of producing goods remained high, profit margins shrank. To try to prop up prices, production of goods was curtailed, even to the point of burning crops.

A time of scarcity ensued, made far worse with the onset in 1348 of the years of the Black Plague. With failure and death everywhere, rulers turned to conscripting peasants into armies of foreign conquest... if only to avoid letting them spontaneously form armies of revolution. The next two centuries featured nearly continual inter- and intra-national warfare. The Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, English against Scots and Welsh, Germans against French, French against Burgundians, and the machinations of the Italian "princes of the Church"--these were all products of a civilization turned from outward expansion to the inward consolidation that marks an Age of Conflict.

Commercial Capitalism to State Mercantilism

Municipal mercantilism was reformed near the middle of the fifteenth century by a new economic system: commercial capitalism. This new system for the accumulation of economic surplus was also a circumvention of the old feudal system, as the armed power of the feudal lords was superseded by the political power of dynastic monarchies.

By the mid-1400s, Europe had begun to settle down from the political, economic and medical upheavals of the previous three centuries. In a remarkably short time, stability at home led to a renewed interest in the outside world. The West, collectively, began looking once more beyond its own shores. The resumption of exploration opened up new frontiers for settlement and exploitation, and these expansive impulses carried over into dramatic advances in knowledge and widespread trade.

So great was the improvement in the West's outlook and conditions that we today recognize this period of rebirth with the term "Renaissance."

The instrument of expansion that made this revitalization possible was capitalism. In this early form the concept of private property (from the West's wild Celtic ancestors) first came to be defended by the armed power of the new political-legal form of monarchical states. "Citizens" swore allegiance to the King as the state, and the state in turn recognized the right of individuals to their own property. As the right of individuals to own things was thus strengthened by law, it became possible for individuals--not just the relatively few lords and guild members--to trade for profit. This voluntary exchange of capital goods over a market-based price system is what we refer to as "capitalism," and it changed the world.

The great advantage this socio-economic mode has over other forms of resource transfer is its efficiency. Under capitalism, profit is not guaranteed--making money entails risk. This risk, borne by anyone who engages in capital transfer or creation, ensures that only those transactions advantageous to the most persons are undertaken. In other words, when your own resources are at risk, you have more incentive than anyone else to make sure that those resources are used in the most productive way possible. This risk factor therefore encourages people to make more carefully considered investment decisions than they might otherwise have done, increasing the overall effectiveness of the entire system. As other economic systems impose costs derived from trying to minimize or even eliminate this risk, they in fact decrease the efficiency of the whole system by lowering the cost of making bad investment decisions. As a result, capitalism winds up being the most efficient at directing resources to the widest advantage.

This efficiency of commercial capitalism encouraged everyone to trust in the system enough to take part. As more individuals and groups participated in the system (because they realized that the laws now protected their right to profit), the productivity of the entire society increased, attaining previously unreachable heights. One readily visible indicator of this is the geographical expansion of Western civilization during the period in question (from roughly 1450 to 1700 in what by the latter date had become the core region of the West). Maps which at the start of this period showed an area not much larger than that spanned by Classical civilization at its height had grown by the end of the Renaissance to nearly complete and relatively accurate maps of the entire Earth. This information exactly tracked the spread of Western influence and knowledge.

(Some reading this section may be wondering whether I intend to "admit" that this expansion of Western influence came at the cost of destroying numerous indigenous cultures, particularly throughout North and South America. Did this happen? Yes. Having said so, there are two ways of studying this effect--one being the objective, non-judgemental approach taken by Quigley, and the other being the subjective "good guys and bad guys" evaluation so popular today. This review of Quigley's work follows his preference for sticking to the description of evidence; for a study of whether the assimilation of younger or less dynamic cultures by Western civilization was "good" or "bad" for humanity on this planet overall, the reader is referred to Dr. Thomas Sowell's excellent book Conquests and Cultures.)

By the end of this time, however, the Western monarchies, their transformation into our modern national states well under way, had begun to shift from attempting to dominate one another by force to a focus on commercial superiority. Since this early form of capitalism was based on profiting by the exchange of goods and services (as distinct from the productivity-based capitalism to come), its institutionalized form consisted of gradually increasing restrictions on capital exchange.

The primary form of this was in national transport laws. To protect their now far-flung commercial interests, national states enacted laws requiring goods to flow through their own territories so that excise taxes could be collected. This acted as a brake on the exchange of goods; and once begun, led to the further institutionalization of commercial capitalism into "state mercantilism."

Exploration slowed. Religious fevers spread by the various descendants of Martin Luther shook all of Europe. Knowledge still increased, but at nothing like the heady rate up to the time of Newton. The West entered another phase of consolidation, this time devoted to understanding and exploiting the discoveries of the Renaissance period. Technological progress slowed, as the introduction of new mechanical tools into industry was so highly regulated (via "craft codes" and other rules) to protect existing work that productivity languished for decades. New tariffs, such as England's notorious Stamp Act, were enacted by the dozens, leading to a ripple effect as other nations followed suit in retribution.

As is usually the case during such times, militarism increased to protect resources now perceived as scarce. States contended with one another both on the Continent and through their new territorial proxies. From perhaps 1688 (when the last Catholic king of England was deposed and replaced with Dutch and German princes) to 1815 (when Napoleon's consolidating ambitions were shattered at Waterloo), the European nations that constituted the West were almost constantly at war with one another; sometimes here, sometimes there, but always scrabbling at each other to claim what they thought were the last pieces of territorial pie.

Industrial/Financial Capitalism to Monopoly Capitalism

Literacy having taken hold in the West as nowhere else, the intellectual aspect of Western civilization recovered from the institutionalization of commercial capitalism before other aspects. The first harbinger of the circumvention of state mercantilism was the intellectual period now known as the Enlightenment.

During this time new ideas forced their way into the public consciousness through the new media of the press and inexpensive books and magazines. Once information could flow freely among people, it did so. Thus, Adam Smith in Scotland could read statistical abstracts of industrial stagnation in France and elsewhere, and from them deduce the principles of free-market capitalism that were to ignite a global economic revolution. (Nor was his work primarily economic. Smith's primary work was ethical; he lectured at the University of Glasgow as Professor of Moral Philosophy.) Likewise, James Watt could be inspired by the engineering concepts of which he'd read to invent a better way to pump water out of mine shafts: a steam engine in which the cool condenser was separated from the hot steam-filled cylinder. This one design change increased pump efficiency so much that Watt's engine could supply power to applications never before possible--such as pulling wheeled vehicles over railway tracks or even dirt roads.

This new confluence of intellectual and technological concepts laid the foundation for the bursts of invention that characterize the 1800s in the West. And as Quigley observes, this inventiveness increased human productivity sufficiently to form a new instrument for the accumulation of surplus. We call it the Industrial Revolution.

The first stage of this change was dramatic enough to receive its own designation: the Agricultural Revolution. During this time, human and animal power were replaced by the vastly more productive mechanical power. Along with new methods of planting and grazing that finally replaced the ancient "three-field" system, the new tools both increased yields and made harvesting those yields considerably more efficient, so that more could be done with less stock and fewer workers.

As was the case when the introduction of animal power freed human beings to engage in non-agricultural work, displaced agricultural workers moved into the cities. The increased social contacts here further accelerated the interplay and generation of new ideas. This also led, however, to an increased spread of disease. In direct response to this condition, medicine was revolutionized by applying the new scientific principles to discovering the true causes of disease. The twin discoveries of vaccines and sterilization (not to mention sanitation) began saving lives immediately. A higher birthrate due to more and better food, together with lengthened lifespans due to medical science, produced a population boom that gave the West (as Julian Simon noted) millions more persons able to contribute their individual productivity to the economic progress of the entire society.

Exploration resumed, this time into the still relatively unknown reaches of Africa and North and South America. Intended primarily to claim new resources by settlement, this geographic expansion also relieved some population pressures. (Deportation of unwanted individuals increased, too.)

With food supplies assured, the religious schisms largely calmed, and a fresh burst of scientific and ethical reasoning driving innovation, the 1800s saw a period of technological progress never equaled before or since. As quickly as a new scientific principle could be deduced and written down, engineers built machines to employ that principle in any way possible.

The application of the new technologies to industry was immediate and unstoppable, and arrived in such great force as to create a new instrument of expansion. This new instrument, like its predecessor, was capitalism. But the new capitalism was based not on the exchange of goods for money but on the production of goods. As steam power became widely used (especially by the railroads), the distribution of raw materials to manufacturers and manufactured goods to consumers opened up vast new opportunities for commerce. Suddenly, virtually anyone with access to raw materials had the potential to become a manufacturer.

The West thus had in place: legal protection for personal property rights (from Celtic tradition); an efficient new means of distributing resources and goods among producers and consumers (from technology); and many new consumers (from advances in agriculture and medicine). Only one factor remained to be developed to allow the new production-based capitalism to become a new instrument of expansion: the transformation of money from physical wealth to intangible value.

This final social invention necessary to spur a new age of expansion was born in the reformation of banking. In order to expand so as to increase production, industries needed money, and lots of it. One key to obtaining that financing was what became known as the "fractional reserve" system of banking.

Until 1694 and the establishment of the Bank of England, monetary payment for goods was generally in specie (the variously-denominated gold and silver coins of the realm). The Bank of England, however, established the principle that notes promising payment underwritten by the bank--banknotes--were "as good as cash," but needed to be backed by bank specie reserves to only a fraction of their face value. This meant that the rest of the value of the note was available for other purposes. As other banks quickly followed suit, vast sums of money were freed for investment in new capital by bank loans.

By 1800 this radical concept of "fractional-reserve banking," combined with the new economic ideas of Smith and Ricardo (again, these were actually ethical theories describing how best to increase the common social good) was at war--literally--with the older bullion and specie-based economy of Napoleon's France, which was now part of the conservative core region of the West. As Quigley points out is often the case, by the time of an age of conflict the innovation that moves a civilization forward tends to come from the periphery of a civilization's geographical extent, rather than from its more settled core. Not only was this the case when peripheral Britain eclipsed core France to become during the nineteenth century a globe-spanning empire "on which the sun never set," it also accurately describes Britain's own subsumption into the European core in the 20th century as the peripheral United States exceeded all other competing Western entities, giving rise to the description of the 1900s as the "American Century."

(The obvious question at this point is: If the 20th century was American, whose stamp will be on the 21st century? Keep reading....)

As with all other instruments, this banking-based "industrial/financial capitalism" slowly became an institution preserved by the elite who most benefited from it. These were primarily the financial wizards of Wall Street, investment bankers who, due to their ability to raise large amounts of public capital, could seat themselves as directors on the boards of the largest and most profitable corporations. This was possible because of the development of the corporation--a business that was owned by public individuals (shareholders) but managed by financial professionals for its owners. This economic innovation succeeded (as it does to this day) because it allowed the great mass of citizens to participate. If you had money to invest, and did so prudently, you could profit as the company in which you invested profited and returned some of its gains to you as a reward for your sound investment. The efficiency of this system (as observed previously) was maintained by the risk factor--the fact that a poorly-managed company could cause an investor to lose money had the dual effect of promoting both prudent investment and conservative business management.

This produced a synergy: as the economy expanded by industrial growth fed by public participation, the public standard of living improved; as the public's economic condition improved, there was more money to invest in new capital to keep the expansion going. The fact that the "captains of industry" profited more than others does not in any way negate the fact that millions of people materially improved their lives far more rapidly than they otherwise could have done. (As, in fact, individuals living in social systems unlike Western civilization could not and did not do.)

Nevertheless, there was (as there always is) pressure from those at the top of this process to eliminate any change in it. This pressure led inevitably to the institutionalization of this industrial/financial capitalism. In this case, the favored control mechanism was monetary policy (the policy which determines the amount and "velocity" of money in a financial system, which controls the value of that money and thus the overall health of an economy). While the industrialists favored a monetary policy of low interest rates and a large money supply (so that consumers had plenty of money with which to buy industrial products and invest in new capital), the great financiers--who because they controlled investment banks controlled monetary policy--preferred to keep interest rates high and the supply of money limited by tying it to known, on-hand reserves of gold (the "gold standard"). Since the supply of gold always increased more slowly than industrial output (except during certain brief periods when new sources of gold were discovered, as in the Klondike and South Africa), every unit of money tied to that gold supply slowly became worth more over time.

This policy of keeping the value of money artificially high, which prevailed until the Great Depression, worked to the advantage of the financiers. The higher the value of money used in financial transactions, the greater the real profits of those who can engage in such transactions.

The problem with this policy is not that the financiers benefited disproportionately compared to industrialists or to workers. They did, but it should be noted that the average citizen also did better over time than citizens working in other economic systems. The fact that a few persons did much better should not obscure the real economic advances made by society in general. Despite the beliefs of well-meaning idealists who rely on incomplete static analyses and faulty zero-sum assumptions, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with an economic policy that produces large gains by a few persons as long as most other persons affected by that policy see real--even if smaller--gains of their own. A rising tide does not lift all boats equally; trying to force such equality of economic outcomes may sound enlightened but will in fact prevent the lifting of boats at all. General prosperity actually requires limited megaprosperity.

To put this in Quigleyan terms, any instrument of expansion requires that some individuals be able to accumulate an "unneeded" surplus. The economic policy of keeping the value of money artificially high achieved this end by benefiting the financiers who controlled it.

No economic policy is completely positive, however. In this case, the problem with maintaining a high value of money relative to the goods which can be purchased by that money (a condition known as "deflation") is the suppression of productivity. If money is too scarce or too valuable for consumers to purchase goods, causing them to reduce their demand for goods, producers have less incentive to create those goods because what consumers are willing to pay is less likely to cover the costs of production plus profits. In a capitalist market economy, less profit means less production.

(A similar effect on productivity is produced by the more common condition known as "inflation." Under inflation, money becomes worth less over time--that is, a fixed amount of money can buy less of the same good. When this happens, consumer demand remains strong but consumers don't have enough money to afford the goods they want. So while deflation reduces the external demand for goods, inflation raises the internal cost of producing goods. As both of these diminish profits, both suppress productivity. The persistence of either condition is thus mostly bad news for a national economy, which is why economists and investors are so sensitive to hints that either condition is growing.)

This deflationary pattern continued for decades, with productivity falling further and further behind what the West was capable of consuming. To survive in this economic environment, to maintain livable profits, producers had to reduce costs. This was achieved by creating more efficient production processes. (This increased efficiency is one of the positive effects of deflation.) Companies could also merge with one another to try to achieve efficient management--separate producers of parts of a complete product would merge to offer the whole product with less administrative duplication, lowering costs.

Such consolidation left corporations mostly alive, but the price of being bigger was ponderousness, arrogance, and a general inability to adapt to changing conditions. By the late 1920s a handful of giant corporations, whose capital value was tied to the international gold standard being used to keep the value of money high, controlled a vast swath of the entire Western economic system. The instrument of expansion that was industrial/financial capitalism had petrified into the institution Quigley calls "monopoly capitalism."

One of the effects of the monopolization of the Western economic system was price inflation due to decreased competition. Since consolidation meant fewer companies in the same business, the external pressure to maintain profits by reducing costs was lifted. As monopolies, companies could simply raise prices. This--and not "hard times" or "social unrest"--is the real reason why the unionization of labor, which had been prevented by management for many years, was finally allowed to occur. Since the wage increases that are the point of unionization could be absorbed by a large corporation though monopolistic price increases, by the middle of this century union membership was at an all-time high. Given the shrinking cost of wages as a percentage of capitalization, and the associated higher cost of idle production lines due to strikes, management found it convenient to "give in" to unionization. Besides, higher wages (the reasoning went) would mean more money available to consumers to buy the increasingly expensive (though decreasingly innovative) products of monopoly capitalism. As the monopolist Henry Ford famously commented, "They can have any color [car] they want, as long as it's black."

The observation by a GM chairman in testimony to the United States Congress that "What's good for GM is good for America" was no more than a recognition of reality. So much of the Western economy was bound to the fortunes of GM and the other monopolies that what happened to them was bound to have an powerful effect on all those who depended on that economy.

By the time the Panic of 1929 paralyzed investment, shattering confidence in business and thus further restraining productivity, the ensuing Great Depression was inevitable. If the West was to avoid petrifying into a Universal State and thence progressing to eventual destruction, monopoly capitalism would have to be reformed or circumvented. The Great Depression forced that choice.

It should however be noted that, like other Ages of Conflict, this third such period in the history of Western civilization manifested in more aspects than the purely economic. Quigley points out, for example, that while the prior Age of Conflict was fought with expensive weapons employed by expensive specialists (mercenaries), so that power tended to concentrate in the hands of a few wealthy monarchs, the development of mass production made possible cheap and powerful weapons usable by anyone. From this devolution of power to the masses Quigley deduces the transformation of authoritarian monarchies into the democratic national states of our century.

By 1900 onward, however, the tools of force once again started to become more complex and expensive: artillery, tanks, jets, The Bomb. National states, which were the only entities that could afford both to produce such weapons and to train and field men to employ them, began contending among themselves rather than exploring. The Boer War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II... virtually all were wars rising out of the impulses toward imperialist expansion that typify an Age of Conflict. (Note, however, that most of these conflicts originated in the core states of the West, rather than from the periphery.)

During the most recent Age of Conflict capitalism hardened from a productive instrument of economic expansion into a protective institution of class oppression, in which workers were pitted against the owners of capital. Likewise, the devolution of power due to cheap weapons that fostered the instrument of democracy was reversed by more specialized weaponry, leading to an institution of imperialist expansion. Another of the signs of an Age of Conflict was the changing of the instrument of intellectual expansion during the Enlightenment into an institution of irrationality in which reason was subordinated to sensation.

During a period of irrationality, if certain facts dispute comfortable social theory or pleasant feelings, then those facts must be ignored, suppressed, or ridiculed into silence. There are all too many examples of such deliberate rejection of careful, honest thought in the most recent Age of Conflict. Marx's social theory was applied without regard to economic virtue or ethical value; Freud was sufficiently plausible to eventually dominate all psychological thought; Margaret Sanger's marketing of eugenics to destroy undesirable human lives was embraced by Adolph Hitler as "scientific" support for his belief in Aryan racial supremacy; Lyndon Johnson promoted a "Great Society" to end poverty by appropriating the wealth of the surplus-creating class (while his MacNamara-led analysts in the Pentagon consistently ignored military necessity in Vietnam); drinking, drugs and gambling became widespread; the academy succumbed to intellectual nihilism and defensiveness ("deconstructionism" and Political Correctness); in short, the latest Age of Conflict was marked in its intellectual aspect by the ascendancy of feeling over thought and wishes over reality.

The Present West

The Evolution of Civilizations was first published in 1961. The observations and ideas Quigley proposed were thus current up to the late 1950s, and reflect the relatively short amount of time elapsed since the the institutionalization of financial capitalism into monopoly capitalism. When Quigley wrote, it was too soon to know if Western society would be able to reform or circumvent its institution of expansion (monopoly capitalism), or whether new institutions of class oppression, imperialist expansion, and irrationality would prove so powerful as to allow the West to become a Universal State on its way to decay and invasion.

It still may be too early to tell. But some of the events and trends since Quigley's day can be added to those he perceived. So what civilization-defining events have taken place since then? Let's first look at what's been most important to Western civilization--the economic aspect. (Technology got us here, but capitalism has had a broader effect.)

Quigley points out that in a modern economy there are three chief claimants to economic resources: consumption, capital accumulation, and government services (including defense). Before financial capitalism turned into monopoly capitalism (by the early 1930s), the emphasis on accumulating capital favored by financiers had far outweighed the other two uses.

By the time Quigley wrote his "introduction to historical analysis," however, consumption had become the leading user of resources, at the expense (as Quigley saw it) of savings and public services. Although government spending had spiked massively in the 1930s, and with defense spending in the 1940s took the majority of national wealth, this was an atypical period that by 1960 had resolved into the consumption-led economic organization Quigley perceived.

But the demand-side theories of John Maynard Keynes would not be easily extracted from Western economic policy-making. (Roughly stated, Keynes held that economic progress needed to be led by government spending to "prime the pump." The idea was that, as spending on public works created new capital and moved money back to consumers through wages, this would spur general economic activity.) Although public consumption of economic resources had arguably by 1960 overtaken savings as a primary use, government spending had not stopped its steady increase. Once the precedent was set that centralized legislators and bureaucrats knew better than states and individuals where economic resources were needed, it was only natural that the central authorities would retain their hold on economic power.

This is most easily seen in the core European states, whose parliaments combine both the legislative and executive powers. Able to both compel and direct government spending of public economic resources, tax rates in these countries rose dramatically. Sweden, for example, eventually raised its highest income tax rate to 98 percent. Neighboring states followed close behind, and even the peripheral United States, with its separate legislative and executive powers, had by the late 1970s a top marginal income tax rate of 78 percent. Once government spending starts, it seems, convincing the central authorities to relax their grip on the national pursestrings becomes increasingly difficult.

But "difficult" is not necessarily "impossible." Although the Keynesian influence in U.S. economic policy could still be discerned as late as A.D. 2000 in "targeted tax cut" proposals, it suffered a serious blow in the early 1980s. Between the "supply-side" tax cuts in the U.S. and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's sweeping privatization of Britain's sclerotic industries, the West found that economic growth could be achieved without high inflation. For example, although by 1986 the U.S. under President Ronald Reagan had cut its top income tax rate to 28 percent, the massive economic trauma predicted by Keynesian theorists never materialized.

Instead, by the year 2000 the West had enjoyed almost two decades of nearly continuous economic progress. Despite brief recessionary periods and higher rates of unemployment in the more socialistic Western nations, Western civilization generally appeared to be prospering economically. Was it possible that the West's Age of Conflict was over?

If so, in which of Quigley's seven stages is Western civilization now? Has the West been rejuvenated by a new Age of Expansion? Or is its apparent success the overripe glow of a Universal State on its way to decline and absorption by some younger and more vital civilization?

The Future West

An Age of Conflict is a decision point. In all the cases Quigley examined, a civilization in Stage 4 always changes to either Stage 3 or Stage 5. That is, a civilization in an Age of Conflict always either returns to an Age of Expansion (if that civilization's institution of expansion is reformed or circumvented into a new working instrument of expansion), or else it becomes a Universal State (if an energetic but institutionalized society is able to gain control over the entire civilization).

So, if the West has finally exited its latest Age of Conflict, in what stage is it now? Has monopoly capitalism been reformed or circumvented by some new instrument of expansion, allowing the West to enjoy an unprecedented fourth Age of Expansion? Or have the instruments of class oppression, imperialist expansion, and irrationality proven too strong to reform or circumvent, leading the West to become a Universal State (probably controlled by the most active peripheral state, the United States)?

One of Quigley's remarkable accomplishments was his development of a model--his "seven stages"--that takes into account both Spengler and Toynbee. Spengler looked at non-western civilizations and perceived that they proceed from an Age of Conflict to a Universal State and thence to destruction. Toynbee focused on the West, and observed that it always managed to reform itself, returning from an Age of Conflict back to an Age of Expansion. In their limited perceptions, both Spengler and Toynbee might be right... but Quigley's more encompassing theory of how civilizations change reveals that the West, like all other civilizations gone before, has a choice. Neither decline nor rebirth is assured.

But although we have Quigley's model to consult, we remain without an answer to the question: Where are we now? Was Spengler right, and are we now seeing "the decline of the West?" Or was Toynbee's instinct correct, and the West has once again revived itself?

Future West (Stage 5)

Let's assume that Spengler was right. If Western civilization has become a Universal State, it should be possible to identify the instruments of class oppression, imperialist expansion, and irrationality that have triumphed.

A good case could probably be made for our Hollywoodized "entertainment culture" being an instrument of irrationality. But we should probably skip this aspect as being too subjective a determination to make ourselves--every age appears more irrational than the one preceding it.

Imperialist expansion? The evidence for this one is mixed. The West since Quigley's day has fielded troops in Vietnam, Grenada, the Falklands, Panama, the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. Yet these conflicts, to which the West brought massively superior firepower, resulted in no territorial gains for the West. To the contrary, there are examples of a Western retreat from its outlying provinces, Hong Kong and the Panama Canal being the two most notable examples. On balance, it does not appear that Western civilization is controlled in part by an instrument of imperialist expansion. (There is a question of cultural expansion, and certainly democracy spread throughout much of the world during the 1980s. But these effects were not imposed on nations by imperialist design; rather, they have been voluntarily adopted.)

As for evidence of an instrument of class oppression... it would seem that the trend has been in precisely the opposite direction. Compared to citizens of other civilizations, Westerners are astonishingly free to improve their lives, to rise above their beginnings to the pinnacles of success. Perhaps the only question of "class" remaining is the so-called "digital divide"--those who have Internet-linked computers and those who do not. But without dismissing this argument too glibly, it should be noted that computing and internetworking technologies continue to leap forward, with a correspondingly swift and continual decline in the cost of going on-line. If there is a question here of "class" distinction, it is one without oppression (who is preventing anyone from owning a computer?) that is changing for the better.

Still, let us suppose for argument's sake that the West has indeed gone the way of Rome, and atrophied into a Universal State. What then? If so, the most interesting question is: What younger civilization is most likely to rise from the ashes of the West? Quigley offers some clues.

The table below summarizes Quigley's impression of the stages of the world's most important civilizations and their likely progress over time.

But this table was created in Quigley's day. Let us assume that we have moved on to the next series of stages, that the West has been engulfed by the United States to form a Universal State, and that the Russian civilization entered an Age of Conflict signified in part by the toppling of the Soviet Union in 1989. The table then becomes:

Looking at this chart, it would seem that, by the time (in the relatively near future) that the West has weakened to the point of being in Decay (Stage 6), Russian civilization may have proceeded to its own Universal Empire (Stage 5). In this case it will likely be too preoccupied with its own internal problems (establishing dominance from a peripheral region over the core) to pose a threat to even an enfeebled West. If, however, Russia emerges from what appears to be its current Age of Conflict with a new instrument of expansion, it would re-enter Stage 3, and be a strong contender for absorbing the West--probably remaining content with the European states.

The rest of the West--namely, the U.S.--might have a different fate. As the chart notes, it is possible that the new Chinese civilization Quigley envisioned as developing would have reached its own Age of Expansion in the near future. In this case, an East-looking China might decide to give its billions of citizens some lebensraum by encouraging them to acquire fragments of Western civilization directly from their previous owners.

I consider this scenario unlikely, however. For one thing, it is simply not that easy to move billions of people. For another, Quigley's chart suggests that an expansive Chinese civilization might have a more local problem to contend with, that being a new Indian civilization entering Age of Conflict. As one of the hallmarks of this period is an increase in imperialist conflicts (over territory of one kind or another), Chinese and Indian civilizations could easily find themselves in the same kind of proxy-fought Cold War as Western and Russian civilizations experienced through most of the twentieth century.

Finally, although Quigley does not discuss it or describe it in his chart, it seems to me much more likely that, if the U.S. part of the West is to be absorbed once it passes through a period of Decay into a time of Invasion, its most likely inheritor will be a Central or South American super-state. Not only would such a state find it considerably easier to migrate physically into its new northern territory, but a new South American civilization would seem to have more to gain than any other civilization by such an infusion of the best aspects of the moribund Western civilization. Imagine the impact of democracy and capitalism on a young and dynamic civilization that lacks stability... then think about the news reports of Hispanic immigration to the U.S.... and, finally, consider think-tank projections that the Hispanic population of the U.S. could achieve a majority by mid-century.

I'm not suggesting that the U.S. is "under assault" by Hispanic immigration, or reaching any other such subjective and even pejorative conclusion. What I am doing is pointing out the apparent similarity between the movement of peoples during previous times of Mixture (such as that of the Indo-Europeans and the Canaanites) and the current migration of South and Central Americans northward. It is not at all certain that this modern migration is the prelude to the demise of the peripheral West--but the possibility is fascinating.

Future West (Stage 3)

But suppose all this has been too pessimistic. Maybe the West hasn't petrified into a moribund Universal State after all. Let's consider the possibility that the West has been able to reinvigorate itself yet again.

First, how has this happened in the past? Is there any pattern to how the West has been able to survive the institutionalization of its instrument of expansion?

When we consider means, in each case where the institutions of the West's Ages of Conflict have been reformed or circumvented by a new instrument of expansion, it has been the West's positive attitude toward technology that has provided the means for the new instrument. More specifically, it appears to be dramatic improvements in transportation technology that make a new instrument of expansion possible.

But why it is that transportation technology has been able to play such a large role in the progress of the West? The answer can be summed up in a single word: curiosity. One of the essential qualities of Western civilization is the impulse so deeply and broadly ingrained in its citizens to seek the unknown--to explore the frontier. The exploration of intellectual frontiers is the hallmark of science, for example. And the role of the physical frontier in the growth of the West (why is it called "the West," do you think?) has been examined by historians for over a century, most notably in Frederick Jackson Turner's still-influential 1893 lecture, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. (Observe how Turner's notion of "frontier" can be used to define Quigley's "peripheral state." Turner's thesis that a frontier society must be strong to survive corresponds nicely with Quigley's observation that peripheral states are typically more energetic in their various aspects than the core states of a civilization.)

The institution of the West's first Age of Conflict--municipal mercantilism--derived from the exhaustion of opportunities for the "have-nots" of the day to participate in Mediterranean and European commerce. The limits on transport prevented the early Western economy from expanding. When these limits were breached by the development of ocean-worthy ship technology that allowed Atlantic commerce via the exploration of the Americas, a new instrument of expansion became possible. The improved transportation technology opened up new resources which could not otherwise be tapped, and allowed more goods to be moved more quickly between producer and consumer. The declining cost of being a producer meant that more persons could afford to do so. And as more individuals were able to bring their personal abilities and energy to economic activity, the entire society benefitted. Internal competition for existing resources declined in favor of external exploitation of new resources. A new instrument of expansion heralded a new Age of Expansion.

Similarly, the second Age of Conflict was resolved when the Industrial Revolution opened up new frontiers to entrepreneurial exploitation and innovation. As transportation became faster and cheaper, more people could participate in economic activity.

But what about the West's third and most recent Age of Conflict? There has been no breakthrough in transportation technology. (Space travel, using merely improved versions of the rockets that propelled the early V-2 flying bombs, cannot reasonably be called a "breakthrough.") Has there, in fact, been some technology invented recently that opens up a heretofore unknown but resource-rich frontier to human exploration?

Perhaps there has... if you accept the argument that the first cousin of transportation is communication. Rather than moving physical goods from one place to another, communication transfers ideas. Since, as patent law for example recognizes, ideas are a form of property which can be created, owned, and transferred, a new technology that allows more individuals to join in the economic flow of ideas could be the key to reforming the most recent institution of monopoly capitalism.

This notion of "information" as the true basic unit of economic activity is a more fundamental and useful approach. What is transportation, or communication, but energy harnessed for mobility? The critical component of economic action then is, in a word, energy. In other words, it's not what you move, or even how fast or how far you can move it, but rather how much of it you can move in a given unit of time that serves as the best measure of economic activity.

From a macro-level viewpoint, goods and services and even ideas are just particular forms of energy resources. Looking at it in this way, the measure of an economy is not how many warehouses are filled with goods, or the amount of investment in new physical capital, but rather the total amount of energy produced, moved, and consumed, no matter the specific forms of that energy. While this measure of productivity is more difficult to obtain, it is necessary to think of economic activity in this way in order to appreciate the true change of economies in history: from physical capital to intellectual capital. (Perhaps we can call this trend "resource abstraction.")

If the preceeding argument is essentially sound, then I would further argue that there has been, in fact, a key invention that has made possible a new instrument of expansion. What's more, its creation and exploitation coincide precisely with the apparent reduction in the number and strength of the various institutionalized aspects of the most recent Age of Conflict over the past forty years. As ocean-traversing technology opened up the New World to physical exploration, this new information-processing technology would open up the new world of ubiquitous computers and on-demand global communication.

The technology that revived the West was the transistor. It can hold a bit of information ("on" or "off") just like the bulky vacuum tube, but it has no moving parts, no slow warm-up time, and even in its early forms it was so much smaller than tubes that thousands and even millions of them could be placed in one square inch to form specialized computing sub-units.

The miniaturization (and associated speeding up) of information processing capability led directly to the personal computer, and to cheap, light communication devices with virtually global range. Now, not only can information be transmitted almost instantaneously, cheap storage and the Internet allow the creation of vast amounts of new information. Of course not all information has value, any more than natural resources such as dirt are more valuable than gold. But the ongoing shrinking of the transistor and the corresponding increase in computing power per unit area at least make it possible to produce some few nuggets of valuable information where no such value existed before.

Now multiply this by the number of persons with access to this source of value. As more and more people gain access to computers, and more computers are connected to each other, and more source data is converted to digital formats, the information that is the 21st century's gold increases as well. This has already had a clear effect on the Western economy, as the increased productivity of Western workers due to more and better information has been a key reason why it was possible to dramatically reduce national income tax rates and still see increased revenues.

So it does seem that the West has a new instrument of expansion. The old institution of monopoly capitalism seems to have been circumvented by a new information-based form of capitalism. (In fact, if Carroll Quigley were still here, perhaps he might call it "information capitalism."

To earlier forms of trade in physical goods and services we have added trade in information; as physical capital is created by work encouraged by investment, new information becomes a commodity available for commercial transactions. As more persons gain access to information processing technology--as slowly happened when agricultural workers shifted from farming to industrial labor during the Industrial Revolution--expansion is ignited once again, this time into an Information Revolution.

And for the more distant future? If the West truly is enjoying a new, transistorized instrument of expansion (returning it to Stage 3), then it is likely to be too strong and dynamic to be destroyed for the next several centuries. First, this new instrument would have to be institutionalized, as all instruments have been and always will be.

It's difficult to imagine what form this institutionalization would take. An instrument generally becomes an institution when the general perception is that easily exploitable resources are running out. At this time, those who profit most from the system begin restricting access to it in order to retain their incomes from (what is then perceived to be) a finite and shrinking supply of resources. But what are the limits to human imagination, the wellspring of an information economy? Will we return to the belief (infamously proposed by a U.S. Patent Office chief) that we have "invented everything," and learned all there is to know?

Again, this isn't easy to imagine. But it's possible. Therefore, assuming that it can happen again, that the "frontier" of networked minds somehow becomes percieved as settled and closed--how will access to this territory be restricted by the few to their advantage?

An information economy consists of three parts: users, information, and the computers and communication links between users and information. The most obvious point of control is the commmunication link. Therrefore, I conclude that the institutionalization of the Information Revolution will come once new ideas are no longer valued, and will be signified by control of communication links passing into the hands of three, two, or perhaps even one master. When this occurs, the transition to a new Age of Conflict will be complete.

And once again Western civilization will have to reform or circumvent an institutionalized instrument of expansion, or else pass into an Universal State on its way to decay and destruction.

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